New x86 Competitor In Town

Montalvo Systems might not be a name you know, but that could change in the months ahead. Montalvo is a company comprised of people with resumes listing high-level design positions at firms like AMD/NexGen, Transmeta, Intel, IBM, and the list just goes on.

Montalvo plans on delivering a unique multi-core chip that they've already designed and filed numerous patents on. That's not surprising considering the work history of several of their employees.

“Montalvo's chips, however, will fundamentally differ from the latest Core or Opteron processors from Intel and AMD in that the cores on its chip won't be symmetrical, i.e. identical to each other. Instead, Montalvo's chips will sport a mix of high-performance cores and lower-performance cores on the same piece of silicon, similar to the Cell chip devised by IBM, Toshiba, and Sony, according to sources close to the company.“

The firm will initially try to compete in markets for products like smart phones, UMPCs, and ultra-portable devices. If the technology takes off, who knows where they might go from there?